This is the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre; OMA's latest project, which takes a intelligently flexible approach to theatre design.

In the typical theatre, the proliferation of front-of-house and back-of-house spaces normally threatens to strangle the auditorium itself, buffering the performance from the outside world.

In response, OMA have taken advantage of the compact, vertical orientation of the Wyly Theatre, with its 11 storeys, which allows support spaces to be stacked above and beneath the auditorium rather than wrapped around it. No longer shielded by transitional and technical areas such as the foyer, ticket counters, and backstage facilities, their re-imagining of the theatre typology exposes the auditorium to the city on all sides.

On alternate nights, the Dallas Theatre Center, for whom the Wyly will be a new home, can perform Shakespeare in a hermetic container one night, or – opening the blackout blinds along the exterior glass walls – with the city of Dallas as a backdrop the next. The tallness and simplicity of the box form, together with the unique visibility of the activities in the theatre, gives the building prominence in the large new complex of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.

The form also facilitates innovation in the theatre’s mechanics: the conventional fly tower above the stage has been extended vertically (with the program concentrated around it on multiple levels), and can pull up both scenery and seating. This allows artistic directors to rapidly change the venue into a wide array of configurations that push the limits of the ‘multi-form’ theatre: proscenium, thrust, traverse, arena, studio, and flat floor – in which the seating, and the balconies, can be removed entirely.

The stage and the floor of the auditorium are deliberately made of non-precious material, meaning the floor can be drilled, nailed into, and painted at will. In this way, together with the easily manipulable seating and stage configuration, the Wyly Theatre seeks to preserve and elaborate the flexible, improvisatory nature of the Dallas Theatre Center's original home.

Images courtesy OMA/REX

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